This month at the Peoples Art of Portland is a vast and colorful trip through characters, mythology and real life. Chris Haberman’s theme ranges over 100 works covering Cartoon icons, fantasy figures and legendary Tricksters throughout folklore and pop culture. Marq Spusta’s private “world” made-public consists of intricate cartoon-folk creations transferring the viewer into another world, children’s book and rock poster in hand. Special exhibition of 2 Portland Cancer survivors (K.C. Cowan/Jan Baross) covers whimsical emotive response paintings and text of their personal battle with the disease, in tribute to Breast Cancer Awareness Month. (Artist Bios, Show descriptions below).

Featured Poster Artist of the Month –
Marq Spusta

Peoples Gallery features a nationally recognized poster artist each month. This month’s artist is acclaimed California based Marq Spusta, exhibiting recent posters, art prints, original drawings and other oddities. and special glow-in-the dark works in our special DARK ROOM INCUBATOR. We will also be having a special print release from Marq at the show!!!

Marq Spusta was born in 1977 in Madison, Wisconsin. He was drawing prolifically within moments of leaving the womb. Marq continued developing his art along side graphic design while attending the UW-Stout. Marq has been living and working on the West Coast for nearly a decade, creating concert posters, album covers and all kinds of prints. His variety of subjects and projects are related in the same mind-spring that his illustrative and cartoonish nature can muster. His variety of projects ranges from designs of concert posters (Dinosaur Jr., Widespread Panic, Soundgarden, Further) to exhibiting intricate paintings, prints and beer bottle packaging. His “world” of characters is reminiscent of a fresh and original memory of Alice In Wonderland meets Where The Wild Things Are, doused with an arty hot-sauce formula that is the signature of the cartoonish intricacy that makes it a Marq Spusta.

The Tricks of the Totemic Toonery Trade: Art of Chris Haberman

Chris Haberman is a Native Portlander, working as a painter, writer, muralist, and gallery curator (co-owner, Peoples Art of Portland Gallery). Aside from painting, he has published journalism and fiction and poetry and is a lifetime member to the Academy of American Poets. He is also the art curator/coordinator for TV show Portlandia (Season 3 -4) and in 2012, he recorded selling his 10,000th painting since 2003.

This show of Totems, Toons and Trickery explores mythos from Native American symbolism to pop culture and Trickster icons through literature and folklore (from Loki to Bugs Bunny and everything in-between). His colorful works are created primarily on recycled objects and found material creating integrated puzzle-poems of figures and text, creating text of subject and most importantly, a good story. A totem is a being, object, or symbol representing an animal or plant that serves as an emblem of a group of people, such as a family, clan, group, lineage, or tribe, reminding them of their ancestry (or mythic past). A ‘toon’ is a cartoon silly!! Trickery is the well known practice of crafty underhanded ingenuity to deceive or cheat, sometimes playful, sometimes not – shown throughout history from the Norse God Loki to toon icon Bugs Bunny.

K.C. Cowan is a native Portlander who has spent much of her life in front of a TV camera, as a reporter and story producer for KGW-TV and OPB-TV. She has always had a passion for the arts and took up painting while working on Oregon Art Beat. She has written many articles for local newspapers and regional magazines and two books, The Riches of a City for the Portland Chamber of Commerce and They Ain't Called Saints for Nothing with artist Chris Haberman.

Cowan’s paintings originated as a result of being diagnosed with breast cancer in May of 2013. In her words, “Painting was the way I processed all the emotions about becoming one of the nearly 300,000 women diagnosed each year in America with either invasive or in situ breast cancer. It's like being told you are now a member of the world's largest sorority that no woman wants to join. I am forever changed by the experience.”

Jan Baross career began with a BA in painting, which led to photography, and eventually documentary filmmaking and teaching at Oregon State University. She has also been a screen writer, journalist, novelist, playwright and film critic. She has published a book, Jose Builds a Woman, several illustrated travel books on Amazon. Currently, she is cancer-free, writing, painting and illustrating books.
In her words, “On September 11, 2001, everything ground to a halt for America. It also ground to a halt for me. I was told I had breast cancer. Because the experience was so traumatic on so many levels, I began this series of paintings to release what I could not fully articulate. After three operations and six weeks of radiation and five years of tamoxifen, I continue to be healthy and cancer free.”

here's some individual pieces from the show. . some of these might or might not be available .. so just email for availability .. jbrown@thegoodfoot.com for the most part .. i think $65 will cover shipping and paypal fees . . that is total including the art . . so $50 for art . . $15 for paypal fees and shipping .. . international might be a bit different